Edinburgh is the 20th best university in the WORLD

The University of Edinburgh has been named the 20th best university in the world, according to the QS World University Rankings.

The University of Edinburgh now ranks as 5th in the United Kingdom, and 7th in Europe.

These rankings are produced by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), a global higher education consultancy, who rank the world's top 1,000 universities.

The key findings

The University of Edinburgh earned an overall score of 86.2, and a global rank of 20th.

Edinburgh also scored 97.5 for academic reputation, 93.7 for employer reputation, 98.6 for international student ratio, 98 for international faculty ration, 85.6 for faculty student ratio and 53 for citations per faculty.

The university is closest ranked with domestic institutions such as UCL.

The United Kingdom is the second most represented university location in the world based on 84 ranked universities. The United Kingdom is the second strongest in higher education, and has nine top 50 universities.

Other notable UK institutions are Oxford, which ranks as the fourth best university in the world, and is the highest ranked university in the UK.

Manchester earned a global rank of 27th, and is 6th in the UK.

What is QS?

Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), is a global higher education consultancy, which ranks the worlds top 1,000 universities.

In 2018, QS's flagship site was visited nearly 70 million times by students, the global academic community and policy makers. This makes them the world's most-consulted rankings of their kind.

QS use six indicators to compile the ranking:

1. Academic reputation: based on survey responses from over 94,000 academics.

2. Employer reputation: based on survey responses from over 44,000 employers about the relationship between institution and graduate employability

3. Citations per faculty: this measures research impact, it divides the total number of citations received by a universities research papers over a five-year period by the number of faculty at an institution

4. Faculty/student ratio: this is a proxy for teaching capacity. Student numbers are divided by faculty numbers giving the global student body an indication of class sizes at their selected institution

5. International faculty ratio: one of QS's two measures of internationalisation, it measures non-domestic faculty at an institution

6. International Student Ratio: the second of QS's two measures of internationalisation, it measures the proportion of non-domestic students at an institutions, which provides an indication of a universities ability to attract talent from across the world.

A spokesperson said: “The University of Edinburgh is securely ranked as one of the leading global universities. We note these latest rankings with interest and we will continue to strive to improve the quality of research, teaching and knowledge exchange achieved by the University of Edinburgh.”